Theatre Arts Alumni
A-Z \ Z-A
('02SOA) -
Efterpi Charalambidis received her Master of Fine Arts in Film from Columbia University (New York) in 2002. Her first short, "Niko´s Restaurant," won awards for Best Actor and Best Editing at the Columbia University Film Festival in 2001. Her second short, "El Chancecito" ("A Little Chance"), shot in Caracas and released in commercial theaters as pre-feature entertainment, won the New Line Cinema Award for Best Director, the Lifetime Television Award for Best Director and many other awards.
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('08SOA) -
Rachel Chavkin is the founder and artistic director of the TEAM (the Theater of the Emerging American Moment), a NYC-based theater company that creates new work to dissect and celebrate the experience of living in America today. With the TEAM, Rachel has directed/co-authored Particularly in the Heartland; A Thousand Natural Shocks; Give Up! Start Over!; Howl, based on the poem by Allen Ginsberg; and Architecting; produced by the National Theater of Scotland.
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('97SOA) -
Lisa Cholodenko’s most recent feature film, The Kids Are All Right, garnered rave reviews, as well two Golden Globes and four Academy Award nominations. The film, which Cholodenko directed and co-wrote with Stuart Blumberg, stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening. Cholodenko got her start in film as assistant editor on Boyz N the Hood and Used People, and after earning her MFA at Columbia, wrote and directed several acclaimed short films.
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('03SOA) -
Deborah Chow is an up-and-coming Canadian director and screenwriter whose debut film, The High Cost of Living, starred Zach Braff and Isabelle Blais. Released this spring, the indie drama probes both the guilt and the unexpected friendship that develop between a hit-and-run driver and a woman who loses her unborn child in the accident.
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Professor -
Nicholas Christopher received his B.A. from Harvard College. He is the author of fourteen books: five novels, The Soloist, Veronica, A Trip to the Stars, Franklin Flyer, and The Bestiary; eight books of poetry, On Tour with Rita, A Short History of the Island of Butterflies, Desperate Characters: A Novella in Verse, In the Year of the Comet, 5° & Other Poems, The Creation of the Night Sky, Atomic Field: Two Poems, and Crossing the Equator: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2004; and a nonfiction book, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir & the American City. He has also edited two anthologies of contemporary American poetry, Under 35 and Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975. His work has been widely translated and published abroad, and he has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books.
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Adjunct -
Melissa Clark writes about cuisine and other products of appetite. She earned an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University, and began a freelance food writing career in 1994. Since then her work has been honored with awards by the James Beard Foundation and IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals), and been selected for the Best American Food Writing of 2007.
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('91SOA) -
Kahane Cooperman is the co-executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She has been with the show since its inception in 1996, serving as field producer, senior producer and supervising producer before becoming the co-executive producer in 2005. For her work on the show, she has received eight Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards. Kahane began her career as a documentary filmmaker.
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Adjunct -
Eduardo Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, which was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Born and raised in Arizona, he holds degrees from Arizona State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He's the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, and the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry.
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('92SOA) -
Kia Corthron's A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in spring 2010. Other plays include Moot the Messenger; Light Raise the Roof; Snapshot Silhouette; Slide Glide the Slippery Slope; The Venus de Milo Is Armed; Breath, Boom; Force Continuum; Splash Hatch on the E Going Down; Seeking the Genesis; Digging Eleven; Life by Asphyxiation; Wake Up Lou Riser; Come Down Burning; Cage Rhythm.
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Mentor -
Ann Craven resides and works in New York City. Her work is represented by Maccarone Gallery in New York, where she presented a solo exhibition, “Flowers,” in May 2010. In 2009, Craven had solo shows BlancPain Art Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland, at CIAP - De Vereniging voor Culturele Informatie en Actueel Prentenkabinet in Hasselt, Belgium, at Conduits Gallery in Milan, and at Galerie LHK in Paris, France. In fall of 2008 The Sculpture Center in Long Island City, NY presented Against the Stream.
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('81SOA) -
Richard Crudo is a veteran cinematographer and member of the American Society of Cinematographers. He served three terms as president of the ASC. He has done cinematography work on more than 20 films, including American Pie, Down to Earth, Out Cold, Outside Providence, Federal Hill, American Buffalo, Grind, Brooklyn Rules, and Music from Another Room. He did his first work as cinematographer with director Michael Corrente the 1993 film Federal Hill, a gritty black-and-white drama about young Italian men on the outskirts of the mob world.
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Assistant Professor -
Stacey D'Erasmo holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. from New York University in English and American Literature. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University from 1995-1997. She is the author of the novels Tea, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; A Seahorse Year, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday, and won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award; and The Sky Below. She is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.
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('04SOA) -
Named one of Variety’s “Ten Directors to Watch” in 2009, award-winning filmmaker Cherien Dabis made her feature film debut with Amreeka, which premiered to critical acclaim at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and won the prestigious FIPRESCI award at the 2009 Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight. Prior to that, she was an accomplished television writer and co-producer on Showtime Network’s original hit series The L Word.
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Adjunct Professor -
Penny Daulton (Assistant Adjunct Professor) is currently the Company Manager for the upcoming Broadway revival of The Heiress. She has also served as Company Manager for the Broadway productions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Promises, Promises, Oleanna, The Miracle Worker, HAIR (Assoc.
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('91SOA) -
Actor and director Adam Davidson has directed some of television’s most popular and acclaimed shows. He made his directorial debut with “The Lunch Date,” which won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes and the 1991 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. Since then, he has directed episodes of a number of TV shows, including Six Feet Under, Lost, Deadwood, Grey’s Anatomy, True Blood, Big Love, The United States of Tara, Friday Night Lights, and Entourage.
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Adjunct -
Monica de la Torre is the author of five books of poetry, among them Four and Public Domain. A native of Mexico City, she writes in Spanish and English and has translated numerous Latin American poets. She translated a volume of selected poems by Gerardo Deniz and co-edited the multilingual anthology Reversible Monuments. Her work is included in the conceptual writing anthologies Against Expression and I'll Drown My Book.
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SOA Alumnus -
Alfredo de Villa is an award-winning writer-director who lives in Los Angeles but makes many of his films in New York. He grew up in Puebla, Mexico. His most recent film, Adrift in Manhattan, was nominated for Best Narrative Feature at the Sundance Film Festival, and it won Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the Indianapolis International Film Festival, Best Director Prize at the San Diego Film Festival and Special Jury Ensemble Award at the Palm Beach International Film Festival.
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Adjunct -
Jonathan Dee is the author of five novels: The Privileges, Palladio, St. Famous, The Liberty Campaign, and The Lover of History. He is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper’s, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. He has also taught in the graduate writing programs at New York University, the New School, and elsewhere.
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('99SOA) -
Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and received the Betty Trask award the same year. Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, was released in 2006, and was awarded the Man Booker Prize, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In 2007 the novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Kiryiama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
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Professor and Chair -
Ira Deutchman has been making, marketing and distributing films since 1975, having worked on over 150 films including some of the most successful independent films of all time. He was one of the founders of Cinecom and later created Fine Line Features—two companies that were created from scratch and in their respective times, helped define the independent film business.
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Courses
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Columbia University School of the Arts offers MFA degrees in Film, Theatre Arts, Visual Arts, and Writing, an MA degree in Film Studies, a joint JD/MFA degree in Theatre Management & Producing, and a PhD degree in Theatre History, Literature, and Theory.
Columbia University School of the Arts offers MFA degrees in Film, Theatre Arts, Visual Arts, and Writing, an MA degree in Film Studies, a joint JD/MFA degree in Theatre Management & Producing, and a PhD degree in Theatre History, Literature, and Theory.